


in a moment there is time

by drfitzmonster



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Zoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-17 12:47:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8144576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drfitzmonster/pseuds/drfitzmonster
Summary: While at the National City Zoo with Carter and Kara, Cat is forced to confront her true feelings for her assistant.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this started out entirely different than what it ended up being in the final draft, but I actually like how it turned out. I hope you all do too. 
> 
> Also thank you to badndngirl for helping make this story (and everything else I've ever written) SO much better.

“Kiera!” Cat yelled from her place standing in front of her private elevator. She glared down at her watch, and then looked up at Kara standing, bent over, at her desk.

“Coming Ms. Grant!” Kara said as she worked furiously at her computer. 

Cat tapped her foot impatiently, and after a few final clicks and twenty seconds of hand-wringing while files copied, the girl was finally able to disconnect the tablet. As Kara rushed across the bullpen to reach Cat’s side she tripped, somehow catching herself before she fell. 

“Honestly, Kiera.” Cat scoffed. “I don’t know why I’m bringing you if you can’t even walk across the room without falling.”

“Sorry, Ms. Grant.”

Cat unceremoniously deposited everything  she was carrying into Kara’s arms. “Don’t drop anything.” Cat warned, enunciating each word to ensure the gravity of the situation was adequately conveyed.

“Of course, Ms. Grant. I won’t.” Kara looked at up at Cat with another one of her infuriatingly guileless grins.

Cat waited for Kara to call the elevator, but when she just stood there staring, Cat sighed and shook her head. “We don’t have all day, Kiera.”

“Oh, of course!” Kara said, startled. She quickly pressed the call button for Cat’s private elevator. “I don’t know where my mind is today.”

“Clearly.”

As they rode the elevator down to their awaiting car, Cat tried to clear her mind so she could focus on the things she needed to accomplish while at the National City Zoo with Carter, but her assistant’s nervous movements were distracting her. “Stop fidgeting,” she snapped. 

Kara had ridden with Cat on her private elevator countless times, she just did not understand why it still made the girl so nervous. It was equal parts irritating and endearing, and lately she found herself lashing out whenever she felt too much fondness for Kara.

Fortunately, Cat was feeling much more relaxed by the time they were all in the car and well on their way to the zoo. Carter’s excitement was infectious. He had Kara grinning like a schoolchild and even Cat herself couldn’t help smiling warmly at the both of them as they enthusiastically discussed which lizard exhibit in the reptile house they liked best. 

“I used to think that the Armadillo Lizard was my favorite, but now i think it’s the Leaf-Tailed Gecko,” Carter chattered absentmindedly.

“Geckos are my favorite,” Kara said. “They’re so cute!”

Cat, who had up until this point been quietly listening to their conversation while checking her email, decided to chime in.

“Funny,” she said, leveling a pointed stare at Kara, “I thought your favorite would be the chameleon.” Cat risked the barb. Kara may or may not be Supergirl, but there was definitely much more to her than she let on.

If Kara detected the jibe she did not show it, she just screwed up her face and turned to Carter, darting her tongue out of her mouth. “A chameleon like this?” And then Kara made her eyes cross and curled her free hand into the shape of a claw.

Cat would have been mad if Carter hadn’t erupted into a fit of giggles. She couldn’t muster the slightest bit of ire though, not when her son had seemed so withdrawn lately. His laughter was a pleasant change. It was one reason Cat hadn’t canceled this trip despite the fact that she had so much work to do. The other reason, the one she could not quite admit, was that she simply relished spending time with Kara.

 

* * *

 

When they arrived at the zoo Carter led the way, dragging both Kara and his mother with him by their hands. An outside observer might mistake the three of them for a family. Cat cringed. They would probably think she was Kara’s  _ mother _ . She looked over at the girl, who was laughing and talking with Carter, happy to be led along. 

Carter first took them to the tropical aviary. He’d read an article about how intelligent African Grey Parrots are and had been dying to see them ever since. He was practically vibrating with excitement by the time they entered, and Kara could not contain her enthusiasm either. 

“Mom! Look! A tower!” Carter pointed at a wooden structure with an observation deck in the canopy of the trees so zoo patrons could better see the colorful birds in their natural habitat. “Will you go up with me? Please mom?” 

Cat scoffed. “Oh, honey, not in these heels.” She frowned. “Take Kara with you.”

Cat settled onto a bench and watched as Kara and Carter charged up the stairs toward the top of the observation tower. She tried to turn her attention back to her work, but was too distracted by the sound of their voices filtering down to her. She kept catching pieces of their conversation beneath the sounds of the birds and the shuffling throngs of people. 

Carter was naming all the different types of birds they saw. Kara giggled as he imitated a sun conure. Now they were both laughing. She thought she heard one of them say something about tree snakes. Cat couldn’t help but smile. They were both so full of life, uninhibited. It made her feel so old, so very old. 

Carter and Kara eventually came back down, both sporting beautiful, wide grins. Looking at her wonderful son, her heart felt so full. 

But it wasn’t  _ just _ Carter, was it, making her overcome? No, it was Kara too, and the easy way the two of them got along together. Cat had never seen Carter open up to anyone as quickly as he had with Kara. She saw him for who he really was. Not even his father could manage that.  

Cat wrapped her arm around her son’s shoulders and looked down at him lovingly. “What now, sweetheart?”

Carter patted his stomach and said, “I’m kind of hungry. Can we get hamburgers?”

Cat looked at Kara, who was nodding emphatically. She rolled her eyes and looked back at her son, smiling warmly at him and running a hand through his hair. “Of course, darling. Lead the way.”

 

* * *

 

The restaurant— if it could even be called that, Cat honestly wasn’t sure— was so garishly decorated it hurt Cat’s eyes. 

“I’m shocked the floors aren’t covered in sawdust,” she muttered to herself as she peered over the tops of her sunglasses. She decided to leave them on, at least until they sat down and she could focus on her beautiful boy, and, frankly, her beautiful assistant. 

Cat ordered for the three of them, holding up a finger to silence Kara’s attempted protests when Cat ordered her two double cheeseburgers and a double order of fries. “I know you have a… _ robust _ metabolism. I don’t want you fainting before we get to see the otters.”

Kara perked up at that, and Cat rolled her eyes. Of course she’d be excited about the otters. She was practically an otter herself: unacceptably cute and friendly, infuriatingly cheerful, relentlessly sunny.

Cat did take off her sunglasses once they were seated. She sighed wistfully at her assistant and her son seated across from her, seemingly in a race to see who could finish their food fastest— it was no contest, though, not even a teenage boy could devour food as quickly or efficiently as Kara. 

Cat poked idly at her burger with her fork. She couldn’t stop thinking about the girl sitting right in front of her. She put up with so much, and Cat knew she herself could be demanding, impatient, and sometimes downright cruel. But here Kara was, smiling, laughing with her son, doting on him, treating him like he was a member of her family.

No one ever cared about Carter. No one who worked for her, no one she’d ever dated. Hell, even Carter’s father didn’t care about Carter, not really. Carter’s father checked out the moment he realized Carter was not a “normal” kid. He didn’t want a sensitive child with asthma who suffered frequent anxiety attacks and had trouble making friends, so he just left. 

Kara was different, though. She was something else entirely.

Cat suddenly realized she was letting her mind drift into dangerous territory. She affected her standard imperious expression and arched an eyebrow as she pushed her mostly-untouched burger in front of Kara.

“Ms. Grant I—”

“You’ve been staring at it ever since you finished yours,” she said with a smirk. “Now chop chop, Kiera, we still have more animals to see.”

“Yeah, Kara, come on! I want to go see the eels!”

 

* * *

 

The eels were more interesting than she’d expected, Cat had to admit. Only in an uncharacteristic moment of weakness, however, would she also admit that she wasn’t paying much attention to anything inside the aquarium tanks. She seated herself on a bench under the pretense of checking her email, and watched Carter and Kara as they darted about the room, pressing their faces against the glass and pointing whenever anything particularly struck their fancy.

Cat couldn’t help but notice her young assistant’s figure in the skirt and blouse she’d chosen to wear that day. Kara was exquisite. She was so tall, so solid, but she carried herself as if she were defying gravity just walking around. Cat watched Kara closely as she and Carter wandered nearby. 

Kara looked so lovely in the tremulous aquarium lighting. She had her sleeves pushed up to her elbows and Cat could detect that her well-muscled arms were dusted with light brown hair. Searching for more bare skin, Cat’s eyes moved up to the place where the open collar of Kara’s shirt exposed her collarbone and the delicate hollow of her throat.

A shiver went down Cat’s spine and she quickly turned her head when she realized she was staring. She focused her attention instead directly in front of her on a small crab moving across the bottom of an aquarium tank. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a hard-shelled, solitary creature, simply scuttling along at the bottom of the sea, with no thoughts of a maddeningly cheerful and unfairly attractive assistant to plague her.

By the time Carter and Kara were ready to move on to the next exhibit Cat had received a barrage of emails that needed to be dealt with immediately, so once they left the aquarium building she parked herself on yet another bench, this time with Kara by her side to help her sort through some documents.

“Carter sweetheart, I need to write some emails and I need Kara’s help. Why don’t you go buy us some souvenirs?” Cat pulled a hundred dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to her son, who grabbed it and immediately took off. 

“I’ll be right back, Mom!” Carter called, turning back and smiling widely before beginning to ascend the staircase up to the gift shop, scaling it two steps at a time.

“Be careful!” Cat yelled back at him. She watched until he heeded her command, slowing and grabbing on to the railing. Satisfied, she took a moment to look down at her phone, opening her inbox to the ever growing list of new emails marked “urgent.”

She felt a whoosh of air, and she looked up to see Carter lose his footing on the stairs and pitch backward. She felt her stomach drop, and everything slowed. Time expanded in a way she’d only ever experienced once before: when she crashed her car. 

Cat was frozen in place, watching her baby boy, her whole life, being ripped away from her as he fell backwards from the top of a flight of concrete stairs. Instinctively, she reached out for Kara, but found the bench next to her empty. Kara’s absence was a shock to Cat’s system, one her brain didn’t quite know how to process. Kara should have been there. Kara was always there. She was Cat’s constant. Without her Cat was rudderless. 

She suddenly felt utterly, wretchedly alone, as the fleeting moment seemed to stretch out, unending. She had no anchor, no family. Carter was gone. Kara was gone. Everything was slipping through her fingers and she couldn’t move. What good was she if she couldn’t just  _ move _ ?

And then Kara appeared out of nowhere, more than twenty feet away, arriving just in time to catch Carter before his head connected with the sharp corner of a stair. 

“Carter!” Cat screamed. FInally able to move, she lunged off the bench and toward her son. She dropped her phone and her tablet but it didn’t matter. By the time she reached him he was already standing, smoothing out the front of his t-shirt with his hands. She pulled him into a desperate hug, clutching at him and kissing the top of his head.

“Mom, I’m ok,” he said, squirming a bit. “Kara caught me.”

“Thank god she did. Now, just let me hug you a bit longer. I thought for a second I’d lost you.” Cat finally let him go and chanced a look toward Kara, who was standing back, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. 

“Kara...”

“I saw him falling. I had to, Cat. I couldn’t just—”

Before Kara could finish Cat pulled her into a tight hug. Cat was scared, completely overwhelmed, unsure of what she had just seen, unsure of what it might mean, but hoping to convey the full brunt of her gratitude.

“Thank you,” was all she managed to say.

 

* * *

 

It was 7pm, and everyone else had gone home for the day. Kara was the only person left in the bullpen. Cat had made sure of that by giving Kara a list of tasks not even a superhero could complete in one day. Cat waited. She knew that dutiful Kara would stop by her office before she left to make sure Cat didn’t need anything else, and then they’d finally have a moment alone together.

Cat had been successfully avoiding Kara for the first part of the day, occupying herself with meetings and appointments, and waving Kara off whenever she came to ask Cat for anything. She knew that if she spoke to Kara before everyone else had gone she’d lose her nerve.

Cat couldn’t stop thinking about what happened at the zoo. She should have known Kara was really Supergirl. Who was she kidding, though? She’d known for a while. Cat had never really been convinced by that stunt in her office that day. There was no more denying the truth now. Kara might be willing to keep up the ruse. But Cat was not. She couldn’t. 

Kara finally entered Cat’s office, lingering awkwardly in the doorway. Cat dropped the papers she was holding, hiding her hands in her lap so Kara wouldn’t see that she was shaking.

“Kiera. Sit.”

Kara scrambled into one of the chairs facing Cat’s desk. “Ms. Grant, let me explain, I—”

Cat held up a hand to silence her. She stood, and slowly crossed to the front of her desk, leaning back upon it. She looked down at Kara, who appeared completely terrified. Clearly she thought something very bad was about to happen. Cat never wanted to inspire fear in the girl like that. She sighed, sorry she’d ever threatened to fire Kara that first time.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Cat couldn’t even look at Kara when she said it.

Kara tried to object. “Ms. Grant I don’t know wha—”

“Please,” Cat practically begged. “No lies. I can’t take any more.”

Kara took a deep breath, glancing up at Cat for just a moment. The girl's eyes were glistening. Oh, how Cat wanted to reach out and take her hand, offer her some sort of reassurance, but she knew she couldn’t, not just yet.

“I was scared,” Kara said. “I didn’t want you to send me away.” She finally looked up, making eye contact with Cat. Kara’s eyes were so intensely blue they were mesmerizing, and there was something dark behind them, something Cat couldn’t quite read.

Cat breathed deeply, trying to focus. “You knew I’d see, but you saved him anyway.”

“Of course,” Kara said quickly. “Carter could have been seriously hurt.”

“It didn’t even enter your mind, did it? That catching him exposed you, and it could cost you your place here.”

“It did, but it didn’t matter. I would do anything for Carter.” Kara paused, averting her gaze. “I’d do anything for  _ you _ , Ms. Grant.”

Cat watched as a blush slowly crawled up Kara’s neck. She saw how the girl’s hands trembled. She seized the opportunity. Reaching down slowly, she caught Kara’s hand and tugged on it gently. “Come here,” she commanded. Her voice quavered, but Kara obeyed nonetheless.

Kara stood at full height, looking down, one hand still grasped in Cat’s. She was larger than life, even in a cardigan. Seeing her now, like this, her shoulders broad, her body thick, her skin golden, Cat was shocked she’d ever been fooled at all. 

“Ms. Grant—”

Cat silenced Kara with a finger pressed over her lips. Whatever Kara was going to say could wait. Tentatively, Cat cupped the side of Kara’s face with her hand. She braced for Kara to recoil, but when the girl simply closed her eyes and pushed into Cat’s touch, she was flooded with relief.

_ Maybe _ , Cat thought, maybe this wasn’t just a bitter old woman’s self-indulgent fantasy. Maybe there was something more to what she was feeling. Maybe her desires weren’t just one-sided.

“Kara...” Cat brushed her thumb along the arch of Kara’s cheekbone. She had so many words but she did not know how to say them. She felt mired in them even, pinned down and on display. There was pressure on her chest, almost like she was drowning, drowning in language that refused to line up and obey her. Why did she ever think she could do this? This was a terrible idea. She had made a terrible mistake.

All of the sudden Cat felt the gentle pressure of Kara’s hands at her waist. It penetrated the fog her mind had drifted into. It was slight, but it was enough to bring her back into the present and out of her panic. Cat looked up into Kara’s eyes. This was her moment. 

Cat pulled Kara closer and, ignoring the fear in the pit of her stomach, kissed her soundly. She poured everything she had into the kiss, all the words she’d been holding back, all the emotions, everything— her universe squeezed into a ball— all for Kara. Every single thing so that Kara would understand how Cat really felt about her: that Cat loved her.

Only after they were both flushed and panting did Cat pull back so she could look into Kara’s eyes again. She’d shown Kara how she felt, and now it was time to make her words fall in line. Cat began, “Kara, I-I—”

Kara interrupted her with a soft, lingering kiss. She stopped to whisper “I love you, too,” against Cat’s lips before kissing her again, more deeply this time. As Kara wrapped her arms around Cat and pulled her closer, Cat couldn’t help but smile. She’d finally made the leap, and Kara— sweet, sunny, steadfast Kara— had been there to catch her.

**Author's Note:**

> Participating in this month's Slam has been a lot of fun and I am looking forward to more in the future. :)
> 
> Thank you all for reading my silly story. <3


End file.
